Izgad is Aramaic for messenger or runner. We live in world caught between secularism and religious fundamentalism. I am taking up my post, alongside many wiser souls, as a low ranking messenger boy in the fight to establish a third path. Along the way I will be recommending a steady flow of good science fiction and fantasy in order to keep things entertaining.
Welcome Aboard and Enjoy the Ride!

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Trouble with My Wife

My wife truly loves me. So much so that she tolerates my libertarian monologuing. She even reads books to better understand and contradict me. A while back I got her to listen to Walter Block's Defending the Undefendable. She then took the initiative of listening to Murray Rothbard's Libertarian Manifesto. A few days ago she downloaded Atlas Shrugged from Audible. All well and good, but she also downloaded Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and has started to listen to it. She did this knowing full well that I have not actually read Smith myself. Her intention is to know more about libertarian thought than I do and being able to stick it to me. I have thus have had no choice but to start listening to Smith. (It is not as dry as I thought it would be. Smith actually was an engaging writer.)

Having to read a book that I was planning on reading sometime before I died anyway, is a minor point. What happens when my wife decides that Smith's labor based monetary theory is totally inadequate to describe a post-industrial revolution economy and therefore converts to radical Austrianism? My wife is already the more religious one in my family. It would not be fair if she becomes a more fanatical libertarian than me. I will not be able to lecture random strangers about the innate illegitimacy of government for minutes on end until she drags me away because I will be too busy trying to stop her from lecturing people. I will have to apologize to statists, which will be totally embarrassing. What if my wife decides that her conscious cannot abide being a government employee, using special-ed children as means to defraud the public and resigns? I will actually need to go out and get a real job for the two of us as my wife stays home to dedicate herself to writing an anti-government blog.

I married this woman on the assumption that she was an Obama voting California liberal. It says openly in our make believe social contract that her role in this marriage is to make me feel guilty about eliminating welfare and public schools so I could compromise with Milton Friedman moderate positions like negative income tax and school vouchers. It is just like my wife to be so dastardly and so wonderful as to make me read more books and push my libertarianism to the next level.

3 comments:

Good to hear from you. I have been meaning to write to you as I owe you a confession. Over the past two years since we last spoke, I have moved in a more anarchist direction. Your book played a role as has reading Rothbard. (I have shown my wife a number of Youtube clips of you speaking.) Another big thing was deciding that, while I believed that military force is sometimes necessary, I no longer trusted the government to do the job properly. This means that we are going to need private armies.

I still support "constitutional" government in which politicians give speeches and "bless" the private armies. People can wave a flag if they so wish.

What is your take regarding Rothbard considering some of the rather nasty things he said about your father?

this is scary. the trouble is she could probably find weaknesses in libertarianism. Ann Rand is a gold mine of holes. But if she is really serious I think she should learn Jurgen Habermass. I don't know what he says but i k now he is very smart and if there are any holes in libertarian philosophy he has probably found them. also i am bothered every single day when i see the good and bad that were part of the USSR. a determined enemy of freedom could easily find enough evidence to knock serious holes in Libertarianism,.

Some of the good things the USSR were housing, central heating of a whole cities from a central plant, the attempt to create a society based on justice and not arbitrary rule of religious fanatics, their space program.Also they seem to have been bale to avoid some of the evils that are plaguing America right now-extreme addiction to law suits, a in capability to withstand the force that are opposed to freedom and democracy from within like Muslims and the Democratic Party.

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